


Different

by jcforever



Category: The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
Genre: F/M, Love, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:33:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27015814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jcforever/pseuds/jcforever
Summary: Cindy Vortex reflects at length on Jimmy Neutron's genius.
Relationships: Jimmy Neutron/Cindy Vortex
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Different

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, this sun will fade and turn to night—  
> all the things we thought or said get left behind  
> but, I have loved someone like you. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> You're so busy being you, that you can't see,  
> just how rare and lovely you are, when you're next to me,  
> and I would do this all again.
> 
> \- Meghan Tonjes

If Cindy Vortex had to describe the love of her life in one word, it would be different.

Jimmy Neutron had never been like her or like the other children. From a young age, his head had been too big for his body. He was weighed down by his own brilliance. He knew how to solve complex equations before most kids even learned the alphabet. While his peers spent their time at the playground falling off the monkey bars and throwing tantrums, Jimmy was assembling his own robot dog and making his way through Whitehead and Russell's groundbreaking Principia Mathematica, teaching himself the finer points of formal logic. He had photographic memory, had travelled through space, and knew everything Einstein like the back of his own hand.

Jimmy Neutron was the smartest person Cindy had ever encountered in the course of her respectable eighteen years, and he was likely to retain the title.

Like all wonderful things, prodigy came at a price. Jimmy had an astonishingly difficult time connecting with other people, especially as a child. He had a hard time processing his emotions, and an even harder time communicating them to other people in ways that didn't put them off. His hefty vocabulary left people confused or uninterested, and his extreme disdain for pop science made any kind of attempted small talk nearly impossible for the longest time. Jimmy didn't talk often about what it had been like for him before his family's move to Retroville, but it didn't seem to be particularly good. His pre-Retroville life didn't come up much, and when it did, he seemed intent on changing the subject, so one could draw their own conclusions about what had happened.

It wasn't like Retroville immediately welcomed Jimmy either. The townspeople were aggravated by this weird boy and his sometimes faulty inventions that sent them back to the cretaceous era or saw them abducted by aliens. In the early years, there were many more of those kinds of incidents. That was while Jimmy was still working out his strengths and indulging his curiosity for the sake of it. In the later years, the kinks in his work no longer caused overtly dangerous situations or mass disruption. He had streamlined his process quite gracefully, and had come into his own as a scientist and and inventor.

At some point, Retroville warmed up to Jimmy a little more, and began to claim him. His first real friendships were with Sheen and Carl. Neither was the sharpest needle in the haystack, but they were loyal and liked Jimmy for who he was, which allowed him to loosen up a little. This had remained the case all throughout middle school and most of high school. Jimmy didn't seem to mind their lack of common sense too much. He was generally content, and he had the unconditional love of his family, so he was able to make it through.

Cindy complicated the picture, which was something she seemed born to do. Her very existence was a point of contention between her dysfunctional parents. She was a bright, gifted child who quickly learned to associate her self-worth with her achievements. As long as she remained the very best student in her year every year and was committed to various extracurriculars, she could keep her demanding mother at bay. Jimmy threw a wrench into that plan with his arrival, and try as she might, there was no way for her to compete with natural genius. It wasn't as if she didn't work her absolute hardest to best him, because she did. She gave it all she had, day in and day out. She did so knowing very well that even when her mind was firing on all four cylinders, it couldn't even produce a fraction of what Neutron could with a mere sixteenth of the effort.

This was a devastating realization, and one that took a while to completely sink in. Not the least because she wasn't sure how to feel about his intellect. Of course, she'd felt indignation at the unfairness of it, hopelessness in the face of it, and sheer jealousy stemming directly from it.

But in the end, the emotion that really won out was awe. Cindy didn't stop to think too often about just how smart he really was, but when she really sat down and considered it, it left her spellbound, breathless. On the few occasions that she'd actually made the time to piece it together, she felt this aching swell in her heart that just wouldn't go away. She remembered the first time her chest had tightened seeing his brilliance in action. She had only been eleven years old. At first, she attributed this...pain...to some kind of longing to be like him, but she soon registered that wasn't what the longing was for. The longing, all along, had been for him. For everything that made him the person he was. Just being around him was maddening, seeing the things he could do, the incredible artistry of his imagination. Cindy had no idea how people looked at him and didn't see what she saw.

She tried to shake it off, tried to compensate for the admiration, the reverence, with seriously nasty insults and and quick-witted comebacks. Anything to hide how she really felt, because she was certain that if he ever learned just how starry-eyed she could get over him, he would laugh in her face. How could she ever look him in the eye and tell him that he was rare and beautiful, and that her rudeness was a cover for the depth of her care for him? There wasn't anyone else like him anywhere. Well, statistically, there were probably other boys with impressively large IQ's out there, but she was stubbornly sure none of them could hold a candle to Jimmy.

And as insecure as she could be at times about how he felt about her, she knew there was chemistry between them. She found it infuriating that he never initiated anything, and the hesitant voice in her head held her back, telling her he could never feel for her as deeply as she felt for him. After all, she was no genius, even if she excelled at some things. And she was no paragon of saccharine femininity like Betty Quinlan either. If he truly liked her, surely he would have done more than kiss her a couple times in grade school. Surely, they'd be together. Even after all this time, charged moments between them would come and go, and it never led anywhere.

That didn't prevent Cindy from continuing to harbor a fondness for him that didn't simply stop at open-mouthed wonder. She was also fiercely protective of him. As a pre-teen, she'd berated and belittled him (and still did sometimes, to keep up the pretense of hatred where there was only its opposite) but as time had passed, she'd begun to ease up on him. She still gave him a hard time (when he deserved it), but only she was allowed to do that. No one else could. Not that anyone else was capable of provoking him in quite the same way, anyhow.

She supposed she'd earned somewhat of a reputation for her protectiveness, too. She'd heard girls whisper in the locker rooms (when they thought she wasn't there) about how Cindy rode Neutron every chance she got but didn't let another soul have a go at him. How she would shout down any offender who dared insult him. They'd laugh under their breath about how weird she was.

Cindy knew she was ridiculous, and that sometimes she let their arguments or her envy go a little too far, but she couldn't help herself when anyone but her found excessive fault with him. Even when she had betrayed him to Eustace all those years ago, she'd felt terrible about it for months afterward. The guilt from that interaction and many others carried forward. She now knew she had to stand up for him, defend his one-of-a-kindness against accusations of strangeness and little charm. If Jimmy heard about any of this or witnessed it in action, he never let on. Not that it mattered to her when she was so far gone.

How could they know what it was like to be him? She sure as heck didn't know what it would be like to carry around an infinity of knowledge and raw talent, to have to save the world at every turn (even if he was the one who'd endangered it in the first place), to be surrounded by people who didn't know what it was like to have a brain that didn't work the same way as everyone else's. He was not and could never be normal.

In the fifth grade, Neutron had tried draining his brain in an effort to be more likable. it had almost ended in disaster, and thankfully Cindy had been able to restore him to his rightful freakish state. In high school, it seemed that the doubts that had led him to use the brain drain technology had resurfaced. Jimmy had become increasingly self-conscious. Where he had once been boastful and filled with pride at his inventions, now it seemed that he almost wanted to hide away his brain. He still invented things at super-human speed, but he became less keen on sharing. He didn't want to stick out so much, but he did. There was no helping that. Students and teachers respected his smarts, but they were also afraid of them. Not just because his experiments could sometimes put them in peril, but more so because they didn't understand him. They couldn't. He was kind of a loner. If not for the company of Sheen and Carl, and sometimes herself and Libby, he would spend all his time in the lab. This small medley of friends, brought together by unusually odd ties, brought out the best in him.

Cindy lived for the moments when all of them spent time together. Though she ran in a different social circle generally, she never felt she could truly be herself around those other friends the way that she could around the chaotic group from her childhood. And furthermore, as far as she could tell, there was no Cindy without Jimmy. She wouldn't be herself without him. He had shaped her, put the stars within her grasp (literally), and as far as she was concerned, he had showed her what it meant to feel, to be alive. Just the mere thought of those piercingly clear blue eyes could send her into daze. Would life ever be the same?

Cindy loved to watch Jimmy in his element, doing what he did best. It was fascinating to see him so busy, so caught up in what he was doing. He had no clue just how remarkably lovely he was even in the most mundane moments. Observing him sweating over blueprints and deftly putting together parts, Cindy remembered time and again why she loved him. Yes, loved him. In spite of all the trouble he caused her at home (simply by existing and being better than her), and in spite of their petty academic rivalries, Cindy was secretly grateful to love someone like him. She was astute enough to acknowledge that not everyone had a great love. Take her own mother and father, for example. They loathed each other, and at times, she couldn't help but wonder if they regretted her too, if they felt as small as she did when they were yelling and throwing things.

It was counter-intuitive but Cindy never felt more capable or happy than when she was around Jimmy. He challenged her, he amazed her, he left her wanting more and more. With her parents, she could only shrink herself down to a singular point. With Jimmy, she could dream. She was worth at least a pearl. She was Special Girl, ready to save the day. She was globetrotting from Egypt to Australia. She was a moonlit maiden on Mars. He had given her a lifetime worth of memories, and she loved him, and only him. Even if she never found the courage to say it, she knew there would always be something between them, an unspoken bond that would never be burnt or cut away or reduced to dust. They were precious to each other.

And even if she loved someone strikingly different, it was worth it. She wouldn't have it any other way.


End file.
